Hussein Bulhan: Frantz Fanon - the revolutionary psychiatrist

Bulhan - Frantz Fanon - The Revolutionary Psychiatrist

Frantz Fanon, Steve Biko, ‘psychopolitics’ and critical psychology

by Derek Hook, Chapter Four from Critical Psychology, 2004

Perhaps Frantz Fanon's greatest source of originality as a critical theorist lies in his combination of psychology and politics. This overlapping of political and psychological forms of analysis is seen in the fact that Fanon approaches the problems of national liberation and social revolution from the vantage point of
psychopathology, and the problems of personal identity through a sustained focus on the violence of the colonial encounter (McCulloch, 1983). To put this more precisely:

"All of Fanon's work falls into that category where the sciences of personality and the sciences of society converge [in an attempt] to traverse the distance between an analysis of the consciousness of the individual and the analysis of social institutions (McCulloch, 1983, 206-207)."

Frantz Fanon and the Psychology of Oppression, by Hussein Abdilahi Bulhan

Few human encounters are exempt from oppression of one kind or another. Whether this oppression is based on race, national origin, class, gender, age, religious belief, political stance, or physical handicap, each of us, depending on circumstance, becomes either victim or perpetrator of this condition.

Illuminating and reinterpreting the work of the revolutionary black psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, Bulhan focuses on the psychology of racism from historical and contemporary perspectives. In accordance with the Fanonian outlook, the author's writing is neither dispassionate nor neutral; rather, he comes to close grips with the subject, bringing new life to Fanon's work and suggesting alternative priorities and orientations to establishment psychology. In addition, Bulhan offers new directions for social reconstruction and self-reconstitution.